There has been a little discussion about some form of anonymous participation lately. You might check out these topics, as they may be relevant for you:
http://meta.discourse.org/t/make-anonymous-posts/9520
http://meta.discourse.org/t/anonymous-posting-mode/4008
Could you provide a little clarification on your use case?
- If you are primarily concerned about preventing random strangers on the internet from seeing the parental support discussions, but want other parents to be able to participate, and identify each other, you can create a category that is only visible to members of a specific group. You can manually add persons to that group. The challenge then is identifying who to trust for this category or set of categories.
- If your support discussions are meant to be One-on-one between a parent and one or more of your experts, and you are ok with the experts seeing the identity (Well, the username, at least) of the parent they are talking to, Discourse’s private messages might work well. Downside: advice that may help other parents in similar situations will remain private. PMs can be accessed by moderators/admin, so keep this in mind when choosing your deputies.
- If you need your parents to be able to maintain their anonymity towards each other, and towards your experts, you would probably be looking more at one of the anonymous features in the discussions I linked. It might be that such discussions would also be placed in a private category, like in the first scenario. I would suspect that in such a case, the experts, at least, would participate under their normal identities.